I was checking out of the grocery store yesterday and the checker leaned over the counter to me, looked to my side, and returned to a normal stand.  He said “that a pump?”

Geez.  It makes me so happy when other people know what it is!  I felt like a cornball for the grin I showed him.

Then again, HE reached out to ME so maybe he feels the same way I do.

He has type one diabetes just like me.  He showed me his tattoo of an insulin syringe on his forearm.  He said he’d tried a pump but didn’t like feeling attached.  I told him I eat too often to always give myself a shot.  He said he takes about 8 shots a day to accomplish the same thing.

That was about it, but he’s my current favorite employee at that grocery store.

It is such a small thing– meeting another type one and sharing less than 30 seconds together.

But it doesn’t feel small; I assure you.

I feel in a way I’m preaching to the choir now but it seems that I feel I can only truly relate to someone else who lives with type one just like me.  Someone who has been 400+ after being 35 an hour before.  Someone who knows how many ways a low can feel and how frustrating every high can feel.  How the volume of our internal monologues may increase or decrease, but will never be silent.  How we’ve learned through the years to do our best to take it all in stride and keep moving through life.

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of support from friends and family: that is huge.  But this one is a different and very touching feeling for me.  This one is one that doesn’t require anyone to say “I know how you feel”.  I know it just meeting him.  It’s a kind of quieting inside and rather difficult to explain.

But I felt in those 30 seconds I had made a friend.  A friend who could be closer to me than most, in fact, despite the many different experiences leading to our meeting at the grocery store. 

It’s a very cool thing to meet another type one. 

Very cool.

AND, you know what else is super cool??  Watching a fellow type one race around the world and WIN.  Congratulations to Nat and Kat!!

The Mayo Clinic diabetes educators have a blog I read when they post every week or two.  I think they are well-intentioned despite the fact I still sense a condescension vibe from it sometimes.  I don’t know why! 

Their blog yesterday highlighted how important it is to recognize that taking a “break” from your diabetes care can be important.

I agree.

For me, taking a break from my diabetes care primarily means taking a break from making myself feel badly about not doing enough. 

Diabetes is with me for the long haul, and I can’t do it right every day or every week or even every year.  It’s going to have its ups and downs, just like the rest of my life.

I just don’t have quite as clear a target range with the rest of my life as I do with my diabetes.

As an example, I was talking to my bootcampers this morning about the clothes we wear.  I mentioned that the more I transition away from practicing law and into physical fitness, the more elastic waist pants I wear, and that makes me somewhat nervous.   I need to watch my weight because a clue of weight gain for me in the past was how my pants fit!

But whether or not I am comfortable in my jeans depends on my weight and when I washed the jeans.  Whether I hit my BG target is right there on that little screen every time I check.  It doesn’t take days or weeks to notice: notification I am not in range is right there in front of me several times every day.

And that is indeed hard to live with.

2010 has been a rough year in my personal life this year, and I know my care has suffered along with that.  But I can’t feel badly about that: I need to recognize that in the course of my life there will be different patches and my diabetes will have its own corresponding ups and downs too.

Diabetes is always going to be a process more than a project; you know that if you’ve ever done the same thing at the same time and gotten different results.  It’s the nature of the disease and the nature of our lives.

So yes, take breaks from what you can take breaks from when it comes to your diabetes.  Take smart short breaks from eating the best you can, take smart breaks from a midnight check now and then.  Take a break from making yourself feel badly about your best not being someone else’s “good enough.”

Take breaks, forgive yourself, but don’t ever stop.  You’re worth much more than that!

Professor Brian Wansink is a smart guy.  He has written a number of books and more than 100 academic articles on eating and why we eat more than we think we eat.  Fascinating.  He’s one of the smarties behind the 100 calorie snack packs.

I told you he’s a smart guy!

I know for me that I realized when I was trying to lose weight that it was better for me to accept that I could not (and still can’t) stop eating halfway through a bag than it was to try and change that about myself and my eating habits.

But what I could change, and did change, was the size of the bag.

I’m sure we’ve all hit blood sugar numbers way higher than we expected because we weren’t paying attention to how much we were eating.  I’ve been known to frequently double-bolus (prior to eating for what I think I’m going to eat, and then after eating when I try to compensate with extra insulin for the additional food I did eat). 

So how do we change our eating habits if we don’t even know what those habits are??

No easy answer, of course, but Wansink has some suggestions to change some habits that won’t be so threatening:

• Sit next to the person you think will be the slowest eater when you go to a restaurant. 
• In a group, be the last one to start eating when a plate is put in front of you.
• At home, put high-calorie foods on the plate before you sit down at the table.  Conversely, bring the veggies with you to the table.
• At a buffet, put only two items on your plate at a time.
• Never eat directly from a package.
• Wrap tempting food in foil so that you don’t see it.

I’ve got a few additions to this brief list. 

• For me, it works to keep the more dangerous foods out of the kitchen and put them in another space altogether, like in our garage.
• If I don’t want to eat it, I don’t buy it.
• If my husband buys it, and I don’t want to eat it, I ask him to keep it on top of the fridge.  (He’s a foot taller than I am.)
• I drink a lot of water.  If I want to slow down my eating at any certain meal, I’ll make myself drink twice the water than I otherwise would.

None of these strategies are going to melt off any weight on their own… but they won’t sabotage your efforts, either, and they are pretty subtle changes that make it easier for you to take off the pounds one at a time.  It’s worth considering.

Have you come up with strategies that have helped you?  Please share them!